Is this serious but not literal or that other thing?

Misty water-color memories:

One of the more disturbing things you can find on the Internet is a video of “The Battle of the Billionaires,” a wrestling match that took place during the 23^rd installment of WrestleMania, the annual Super Bowl of professional wrestling.  This event took place in April of 2007, at Ford Field, the home of the NFL’s Detroit Lions.  The Battle of the Billionaires itself was a clash between wrestlers Umaga and Bobby Lashley, who had been chosen by Vince McMahon and Donald Trump to represent each of them in a proxy battle between the two plutocrats. 

The back story of this particular WrestleMania plot line was elaborate, even by the baroque standards of the campy and melodramatic pseudo-sport that is contemporary professional wrestling in America.

That story begins three months earlier.  McMahon, the undisputed tycoon of the “sport,” arranges to have Rosie O’Donnell wrestle Donald Trump on McMahon’s wild popular weekly USA Network telecast, Monday Night Raw.  (This match features wrestlers playing O’Donnell and Trump, rather than the real-life versions of these individuals, who at the time supposedly were engaged in a running feud in the media, no doubt concocted by their respective publicists.  In the middle of the match, “O’Donnell” jumps out of the ring and gorges herself on a cake at ringside. Subtlety is generally not a feature of this particular art form). 

Three weeks later, during that week’s episode of Monday Night Raw in Dallas, McMahon appears in the ring as the impresario of what he is billing as Fan Appreciation night. McMahon begins his speech by making fun of Texas accents, and claiming that anyone in a cowboy hat looks stupid.  Vociferous boos rain down from the crowd.

McMahon, in wrestling argot, is playing the part of the heel, that is, the villain of the melodrama.  He thanks the fans effusively for making him a billionaire.  (This is not hyperbole.  In 2020 McMahon’s net worth was estimated to be $2.6 billion). He then tells the crowd he wants to give each fan a special gift, but can only honor one of them in this way.  He “randomly” chooses an attractive and half-dressed young woman, who is brought into the ring, and presented with enormous facsimile of the cover of McMahon’s magazine Muscle Fitness, featuring McMahon himself flexing his biceps.  (The boos become deafening).

At this point Donald Trump appears on the arena’s giant scoreboard screen, and addresses McMahon, upbraiding him for not understanding his audience, and failing to give them “value” for their entertainment dollar, which Trump describes as his specialty.   Trump says he is going to give the fans what they really want – money. (Wild cheers erupt from the crowd) Several thousand dollars in actual currency then rain down from the arena’s upper reaches, triggering a frenzied scramble. Lucky fans display real $100 bills to the cameras for the millions watching at home. A supposedly humiliated McMahon starts ranting about how this is actually his money, and demanding that the fans hand it over to him.

All this is what is known in the trade as “kayfabe.”  Kayfabe is the code word used traditionally by people in the wrestling business to describe those elements of the business that are presented to the audience as if they spontaneous rather than scripted.  Such elements include the conceit that the matches themselves are real athletic competitions, that the stage personas of the performers – their “gimmicks” – are something other than elaborate fictions, that the feuds, alliances, and romances between various performers in the ring and off stage are genuine, and so forth.

In our increasingly post-truth world, kayfabe can serve as a convenient shorthand for the whole genre of what in the broader entertainment business has become known as “scripted reality” – that is, scripted dramas that present themselves not as mimetic representations of life, like a play or a film, but as real-life events. 

From A Fan’s Life (2022)